Alison Frankel

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Last week, on the evening of Sept. 11, a lawyer named Mark Werbner stood outside his hotel in Brooklyn and looked across the East River at the blue lights commemorating the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001. Werbner, who is from Dallas, was in New York because he represents American victims of Hamas bombings and shootings during the second Palestinian Intifada. Since early August, he and his co-counsel have been trying the victims’ claims against Jordan’s Arab Bank, which they accuse of financing the Hamas terror operations. As he looked at the blue lights, Werbner told jurors Thursday during closing arguments in the Arab Bank trial, he stepped back and asked himself whether the 10 years of work he’d put into the case had accomplished anything.

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There are probably fewer than 100 lawyers in America who argue regularly before the U.S. Supreme Court and the highest state courts of appeal. And of those, a scant handful argue against corporate interests. That is particularly true when banks are involved: Lawyers who practice at big firms that regularly represent (or hope to represent) financial institutions avoid cases that endanger those relationships, even when one bank is suing another. But the renowned former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement left behind those concerns in 2011 when he left King & Spalding and joined Bancroft, a tiny appellate startup. Last year, Clement took up the Supreme Court case of small merchants suing American Express for antitrust violations. (He lost.) Now he’s turned up to oppose banks in one of the biggest-dollar appeals in the courts. On Tuesday, as first reported by the New York Commercial Litigation Insider, Clement appeared as counsel of record in HSBC’s motion, as a mortgage-backed securities trustee, for the New York Appellate Division, First Department to reconsider its Dec. 19 ruling on the timeliness of MBS breach-of-contract claims or else let the case proceed to the state’s highest court.

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In the last few months, the victims of supposed overseas human rights atrocities have begun to feel the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last April in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. As you know, the Supreme Court held that Alien Tort Statute cases cannot proceed in U.S. courts unless they have a significant connection to the United States. As a result, ATS claims by foreign citizens accusing international corporations of abetting torture and murder on foreign soil have since been dismissed against Daimler, Arab Bank, Rio Tinto and KBR. Some ATS cases have survived post-Kiobel scrutiny, as my friend Michael Goldhaber reported for The American Lawyer in August, and alleged victims can still assert claims under Other U.S. laws that specifically apply to conduct abroad. But without a doubt, Kiobel has extinguished the jurisdiction of U.S. courts over a wide swath of human rights litigation.

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In 2012, five African-American Detroit homeowners and a Michigan legal services group asserted a notably creative legal theory in a class action against Morgan Stanley. Their lawyers at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and the American Civil Liberties Union acknowledged that Morgan Stanley didn’t write the supposedly predatory mortgages that victimized African-American borrowers in Detroit. Those housing-bubble mortgages were originated by New Century, a notorious subprime lender that went under in 2007. But the suit argued that New Century was writing loans to feed Morgan Stanley’s securitization machine. Because Morgan Stanley wanted to bundle certain types of subprime loans into its mortgage-backed securities, the theory went, its policies guided New Century’s predatory practices. So according to the homeowners’ suit, Morgan Stanley was actually responsible for the disparate impact of New Century’s discriminatory lending.

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Last spring, when U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of Manhattan decimated the consolidated private litigation over banks’ manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, the only claims that remained upright in the rubble of her ruling were those brought under the Commodity Exchange Act, which makes tampering with the price of exchange-traded commodities or futures illegal. Buchwald’s opinion cited a plethora of Manhattan federal court decisions that permitted victims of futures price manipulation to move forward with their suits, including three consolidated class actions involving rigged prices for oil futures. I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more about those cases over the next several months. Even as the class action bar tries to persuade the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the Libor antitrust claims that Buchwald dismissed, plaintiffs lawyers are gearing up for the next big litigation: claims that BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and other unidentified conspirators violated commodity and antitrust laws by reporting false prices for North Sea Brent crude oil to the price-setting agency Platts.

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To say that the hearing to evaluate Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion breach of contract settlement with investors in Countrywide mortgage-backed securities got off to a slow start would be something of an understatement. In a courtroom so crowded that New York State Supreme Court Justice Barbara Kapnick repeatedly admonished observers to clear a path to the door, the judge heard hours of pretrial motions, many on issues she regarded as already settled. In particular, objectors to the settlement – led by AIG, several Federal Home Loan Banks and other assorted pension and investment funds – told Kapnick that they should not be forced to proceed with opening statements until they’ve had a chance to take depositions based on privileged communications between Bank of New York Mellon, the Countrywide MBS trustee, and its lawyers at Mayer Brown. Kapnick ordered the documents produced late last month, and AIG counsel Daniel Reilly of Reilly Pozner said it wouldn’t be fair to begin a hearing to determine whether BNY Mellon made a reasonable decision to agree to the $8.5 billion settlement – which resolves potential claims by 530 trusts that Countrywide breached representations and warranties about underlying mortgage loans – until objectors have quizzed witnesses on the confidential material.

Author Profile

Alison Frankel updates On the Case multiple times throughout the day on WestlawNext Practitioner Insights. A founding editor of the Litigation Daily, she has covered big-ticket litigation for more than 20 years. Frankel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The American Lawyer and several other national publications. She is also the author of Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin.